Wednesday, September 2nd @ 7:00 PM
MARNIEDirected by Alfred Hitchcock • 1964
How did Marnie (Tippi Hedren), the frigid typist, develop a compulsion for stealing? Why does her boss (Sean Connery) blackmail her into marriage­? What traumas lie inside Marnie’s childhood home on the fringes of Baltimore? A psychoanalytic case history structured like a conjugal detective adventure and decorously promoted as “Hitchcock’s Suspenseful Sex Mystery,” Marnie literalizes the return of the repressed. Initially dismissed as a technically incompetent relic brought down from the attic of once-fashionable high Freudianism, Marnie was quickly rehabilitated by auteurists, feminists, and Hitchcock fanciers as a conflicted confession from the inner sanctum of the patriarchy. (Significantly, Hitchcock commissioned the final script from neophyte Jay Presson Allen after his usual collaborators proved unwilling and unable to deliver a scene depicting marital rape, making Marnie that rare Hollywood examination of sexual conquest that actually happens to be written by a woman.) Seen in an original IB Technicolor print, it’s also an aesthetic wonder—a precisely calibrated cinema machine that periodically breaks down in a hysterical miasma of red light. (KW)
130 min • Universal Pictures • 35mm IB Technicolor from private collections

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